Skip to main content
Main

Indian Meal Gruel

A thickened gruel made from Indian meal, flour, and water, simmered for 1½ hours and finished with milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Indian Meal Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. In a bowl, blend Indian meal, flour, salt, and cold water to make a smooth paste.

Cook and finish

  1. Stir the paste into boiling water.

  2. Boil slowly for 1½ hours.

  3. Dilute with milk or cream, and strain before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Its starch thickens the boiling water and gives the gruel its body.
Flour
Adds more starch, helping thicken the gruel and give it a smoother texture.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 1½ hours. Cornmeal and flour starches need a long, gentle boil to swell fully and lose their raw taste. Stirring helps keep the mixture from sticking and scorching on the bottom of the pot.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes